By Xinhua
Beijing : Japanese astronaut Takao Doi is looking forward to his country’s entry into human spaceflight next week when he helps deliver a small storage room for Japan’s massive Kibo lab at the international space station.
Doi and six crewmates are set to launch toward the station aboard the space shuttle Endeavour on March 11 during a predawn liftoff from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.
“I feel that this is truly the most exciting moment in my life,” said Doi, a veteran spaceflyer representing the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). “This is a huge mission.”
During their marathon 16-day flight — the longest construction mission ever aimed at the space center — Doi and his STS-123 crewmates will install the new Japanese module atop the station’s hub-like Harmony connecting node, deliver the two-armed Dextre maintenance robot for the Canadian Space Agency and swap out one member of the orbiting laboratory’s crew. But the personal highlight for Doi will come when he opens the hatch to Japan’s first habitable room in space.
Japan’s storage module is the first of three separate components that will make up the country’s Kibo — Japanese for “Hope” — laboratory. In addition to the first compartment, known as the Japanese Logistics Module, a tour bus-sized main laboratory and a robotic-arm equipped external science platform will follow on subsequent NASA shuttle flights.
The first module is a squat cylinder about 14 feet (4 meters) long, with a weight of about 18,490 pounds (8,387 kg). Designed to serve primarily as an orbital attic for the main Kibo experiment module, the small logistics room is built to fit eight racks of equipment inside its 14-foot (4-meter) wide interior.